Blame Francis Bacon: the metaphor of progress and the progress of metaphor in science

in Communicating Biological Sciences: Ethical and Metaphorical Dimensions (2009), B. Nerlich, R. Elliott and B. Larson (Eds). Ashgate.

Recent scandals in the biosciences have highlighted the perils of communicating science leading many observers to ask questions about the pressures on scientists and the media to hype-up claims of scientific breakthroughs. Journalists, science writers and scientists themselves have to report complex and rapidly-developing scientific issues to society, yet work within conceptual and temporal constraints that shape their communication. To date, there has been little reflection on the ethical implications of science writing and science communication in an era of rapid change.

Communicating Biological Sciences discusses the 'ethics' of science communication in light of recent developments in biotechnology and biomedicine. It focuses on the role of metaphors in the creation of visions and the framing of scientific advances, as well as their impact on patterns of public acceptance and rejection, trust and scepticism. Its rigorous investigation will appeal not only to science writers and scientists, but also to scholars of sociology, science and technology studies, media and journalism.

‘Bringing Bones to Life: How Science Made Piltdown Man Human’

(2007) Science as Culture, 16:4, pp. 333-357

‘Boundary-Work and the Human-Animal Boundary: Piltdown Man, Science and the Media’

(in press) Public Understandings of Science

The infamous Piltdown hoax offers an excellent opportunity to study how a figure that straddled the human–animal boundary (both figuratively in its positioning as a “missing link,” and literally given its post-hoax status as a modern human skull and a modern orang-utan jaw) was made to fit dichotomous understandings of it. The process of making this figure human reveals how scientific claims in the disputed border zone between humans and non-human animals are shaped by the cultural themes upon which the division stands. Nationalism, race and species classification became enmeshed in the efforts to lead Piltdown from its liminal position to more conceptually stable ground. The result was a stretching of humanness, that brought Piltdown closer to us whilst modern-day “savages” were moved further away. The paper’s theoretical framework shifts Gieryn’s boundary-work model from an ontology of culture to an ontology of nature. Transplanting Gieryn’s model in this way is useful not only because of the parallels specifically between the science–culture and human–animal boundaries, but also as it serves as a reminder of the strong relationship between the categorization of the social and natural worlds.

Modafinil in the media: Metaphors, medicalisation and the body

Published in Social Science and Medicine, February 2009. Co-authored with Brigitte Nerlich and Paul Martin.

This paper uses a sample of UK media reports on the sleep drug modafinil to investigate the medicalisation of sleep at a conceptual level.  Using metaphorical frame analysis we investigate the conceptual links created in media discourse between sleep and health, and the body and technology. Using this novel analytical tool we explore under what circumstances modafinil is constructed as a necessary medical treatment or a (il)legitimate performance enhancement and, how in this process, various images of the body are constructed. We found that media discourse on modafinil was structured through four types of sleep discourse: patient; sports; recreational; and occupational. Each discourse was built up around the specific deployment of three central metaphorical frames ‘war’, ‘commodity’ and ‘competition’ that acted to construct the biological body in a particular way. How the body was framed in each discourse impacted upon how modafinil use was portrayed in terms of therapy or enhancement and the level of engagement with a medical rhetoric. This had distinct normative implications strongly influencing the legitimacy afforded to modafinil use in each domain. Our analysis considered the normative issues allied to medical authority and argues that medical authority acts to legitimise enhancement for repair, restoration and relief of suffering, whilst being deployed to pass judgment on enhancement in bodies already perceived as functioning normally. This leads us to conclude that conceptually, the acceptability of ‘enhancement’ is strongly tied to context of use and intricately related to medical social control.